MindSpinner

The Stone Path (2004)

The stone path became
because space wanted defining
because the eye needed someplace to wander
through the garden that is mostly not yet.

I was happy as soon as I laid the first rock
and found another to fit beside it.

If I had had money
I might have bought rocks
on palettes delivered by truck.

If I had had more money
I might have hired men with strong backs
who knew what they were doing,
men with the right equipment for the job
to make the path smooth and straight and level.
They would have
laid it in a day
and left me with a bill
and bootprints.

But I had no money.
Just this once I’m grateful.

Down the street, bulldozers have been carving
foundations out of fields undergirded with rock.
They claw up granite,
even ancient sea floor.

The rocks sing to me
from the piles the dozers make.

I revel in the finding,
in forms and sizes,
in gray granite
scraped white by dozer teeth,
in rocks pressed with fossil shells,
in angles of brokenness.

Some of the rocks I covet are too big to lift.

Like a burro set against a harness
I drag them across construction sites
in a stubborn little wagon
that does not steer
and lay them shape to shape.

I am a forty-three-year-old child
at play with stones and sticks
and bits of flowers.

I am an old woman cobbling together
what can be had of eternity
in daffodils naturalized,
can’t-kill-‘em roses,
and rocks arranged,
meandering,
not quite level,
with irregular spaces for sedum
and creeping thyme
and upstart weeds
between.

The path unfolds itself as if it knows
where it is going,
loops in a circle around something yet to be,
and branches off to cross the grass
to the empty field
where dogwood and rhododendron
will grow someday, maybe.
(For now it will do
that they grow in the vision
I see when I look across
the scarred, weedy field,
with its low spot that makes a pond
when it rains.)

I’ve begun to work backward
from the path
as metaphor,
as people are compelled to do with paths,
to see where they lead
into meaning.
But I do not yet – and may never – know
enough of paths to chisel
wisdom in white space.

I do know that I will pick up rocks
through the summer
as the last houses across the street are built
until ragged fields and rocks and fossil shells
disappear under lawns and fences and children at play.

I know one sunny day after school this spring
I will pull my car off the road
where the bluffs in S____ County
shed rocks down their torn faces.
And I will fill my trunk with rocks.

I know the path will take its form
from their brokenness,
and that it will never reach horizons
as roads do,
but will weave instead through
a garden grown in my mind
and maybe someday too the soil
of the half acre that has come to me,
where I make the path
because it is the path
that I can make.

I know I was happy as soon as I laid the first rock
and found another to fit beside it.